Two MTA board members admitted Wednesday that the agency has mismanaged its money — as a top transit official declared that the current subway crisis is “an emergency.”

Board member James Vitiello griped that not enough money has been spent on issues that need to be urgently addressed, like subway maintenance.

“We have taken on projects that have been expensive . . . like Second Avenue Subway or cashless tolling,” he conceded during a meeting at MTA headquarters in Manhattan. I think we’re coming around to seeing we may have done some of that at the expense of day-to-day maintenance.

“Let’s be realistic about this, our riders have already declared this is an emergency and we recognize this as an emergency,” Acting Chairman Fernando Ferrer said at the meeting.

Members acknowledged the agency is beset with problems — and a chronic lack of accountability. Scott Rechler called the entire MTA system “immensely broken.” “We are at such a point of crisis that it requires approaching it differently,” he said.

Board member Charles Moerdler blamed the system’s woes on “insufficient investment over the past four decades.”

At the same meeting, Interim Executive Director Ronnie Hakim offered a tepid mea culpa to straphangers.

“We understand that our customers are frustrated,” she said. “I’m directing a top-to-bottom review of how we respond to delays in the subway system.

“We need to do our own forensics on these delays and figure out how to avoid them and when they occur, how to react more quickly and how to deal with them.”

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“All of these measures are on the table,” he said. “We have to do it faster. We have no other option.”

Hakim added that they’re looking at what other transit systems have been doing.

“We’ve already been consulting with subject-matter experts internationally to see what other systems are doing, what are other ideas, what are other technologies that would benefit our subways,” she said.

Board member Mitchell Pally suggested that the situation is so bad now that subway riders should get discounts for enduring subpar service.

He floated the idea after the agency announced Tuesday that some Long Island Rail Road customers affected by the summer repairs at Penn Station will be receiving 25 percent discounts.

“When people are inconvenienced and people are not being provided with a service we said we would provide, we should give them something back,” he said.